PODCASTS, from A to P Basics of Podcasting 1) What are podcasts all About? 2) Where do I get podcasts? 3) How do I start receiving a podcast? Art Gresham UCHUG Editor July 18 2009 Seniors Computer Group
1) What are podcasts all About? What Are Podcasts? They are the modern equilivant of your neighborhood newspaper boy, who delivered the news to your driveway overnight. Today there are websites whose purpose is to automatically send some file content to your computer on a regular basis. Podcast is really just another name for an RSS FEED. An abbreviation for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It is a format for delivering regularly changing webcontent. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to subscribers.
The content could be a text news story, video, or audio file. I will demo the concept with audio files, which are usually MP3 files, like news broadcasts, or music. And we will also see a Video podcast. When the MP3 file is downloaded onto your computer you can listen through your speakers, or headphones to the broadcast (with MediaPlayer or other audio program). Or you can load it onto your portable MP3 player (or IPOD!). From this usage PODCAST (ipod Broadcast) became a popular term for RSS feeds.
Why use RSS (Podcasts)? RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. They allow you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is huge and growing rapidly. Podcast.com list more than 85,000 podcasts.
2) How do I Get podcasts? A: Use RSS Feed Readers and News Aggregators Feed Reader, or News Aggregator, or podcatcher, software allows you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and save them on your computer hard drive for you to read and play. A variety of RSS Readers are available for different platforms. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac) and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). Also itunes and my favorite called Juice. Almost all are free ($0!). There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers.
Once you have selected your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. This is often called subscribing. Many sites display the orange feed icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.
Here is a screenshot of my subscriptions, using the program JUICE. Here you see that I have subscriptions to several American Public Media (APM) and NPR radio programs.
Here is a screenshot of Juice, showing the Downloads I already have received, and you can also see several that are simultaneously in progress. I can either listen to the downloaded files using MediaPlayer, or copy them onto my Thumbdrive MP3 device, portable player, or ipod.
3. Where can I find podcasts? There are many hundreds of sites that offer RSS subscriptions. I will give you a few good quality examples, but you can find many more on topics that interest you. To find these you may have to look carefully on a site for the indicator or text that will lead you to their feed page. I will show you one example... Suppose you like the news from Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/ Is a very complete news site. Look on the left side of their home page, below their news categories and you will see this The RSS with the common orange symbol leads to a page full of feeds you may choose from. These include text articles, video and blogs such as... So let's subscribe to the Politics News Article Feed. Just click on the
The page that opens (powered by FeedBurner) has some buttons that can automate inserting the feed into one of several accounts you may have, such as My:Yahoo. You can also click the box for 'other readers'. We will do that later. For now I will click My Yahoo.
The browser ( I use Firefox, you should too) opens a tab on MyYahoo, inserts the feed, automatically displays the most recent feeds, and allows me to accept this new feed.
Going back to that previous screen we can see in the drop-down list that we could also automatically add it to one of these readers you may have installed. I have none of these, so I would need to add it to my Juice selections manually. To do that I just need the address of the RSS. Make note that this basic form (generated by the Feedburner service) is use elsewhere on this site, and by other sites as well so it is a very common format that you may see again.
To do that I will try the XML link and should be able to find the address of the RSS on the page that it displays Clicking this link displays...
So here is the page viewed as an html webpage. Not really useful, except you can capture that address there in the address bar. That is what you will need for most FeedReaders to fill in the subscription address. We just need to highlight, copy (^C) and paste it in your reader. OR clicking Subscribe Now will probably add it directly to your feed reader list, depending on how it operates. Notice that Firefox is also giving me the option to put it into its Live Bookmarks. I already have three news feeds there and I find it very useful. Notice the BBC and NPR bookmarks just below the address bar. I will click on one and show the current (well history by the time you see this) news stories for NPR World...
Here is an example of the LiveFeed for the NPR World RSS Feed. It shows a continuously updated list of their stories. Clicking one of these stories directly opens their web page to that story. So I get to pick the news stories I want to read from a short list of headlines.
Going back for a moment to the Reuters home page there is one other useful link we must look at. It is the one labeled Podcast. Clicking to this page leads to a page of their Video and Audio Podcasts.
Here again, just below the description of the feed, is the familiar RSS icon. It will open a page similar to the one we just saw for using the automated feed setups to the familiar applications like Yahoo. But in addition on this page they have listed the actual URL directly (so we do not have to do that odd open the html page process to copy the address. It is right here for us to copy and paste into our podcast client program
Naturally different sites will use different methods and variations on how to find their podcasts or news feeds. Here it the menu from the left side of the NPR.ORG site. The News Feeds menu leads to the basic html page we saw at Reuters. Their Podcasts page lets you describe and set up selections of your own choosing. Whatever method the site uses you should be able to find one of these methods available to make your selection. The difficult part may be in choosing only a few so that you can have time to actually view or listen to them all.
Who publishes feeds? Most of the biggest names on the web offer content feeds including USATODAY.com, BBC News Headlines, ABCNews, CNET, Yahoo!, Amazon.com (including a podcast!), and many more. Google publishes feeds as part of many of our services; for example, you can get a feed of new items for any search you make in Google News. In addition, hundreds of thousands of bloggers, podcasters, and videobloggers publish feeds to keep themselves better connected to their readers, listeners, admirers, and critics. Apple, through its itunes Music Store, offers tens of thousands of audio and video podcasts for download, each of which is powered by a feed.
A moment Under The Hood of a podcast... The creation of these pages is very simple for anyone with basic web page Writing skills. I recently created an audio track describing the process of Podcast Page creation for the Under The Hood Computer Group demonstration I gave this past May. The Podcasting 101 audio and the xml file with the standard RSS extension was uploaded onto a website for the demonstration. Here is the page opened in my browser...
RESOURCES These are web links for more info about RSS & Podcasts, Readers, Finding and Creating podcasts RSS Explained www.whatisrss.com Introduction to RSS www.webreference.com What Is RSS www.xml.com RSS Feed Readers - Juice www.juicereceiver.sourceforge.net - AmphetaDesk www.uatsap.com.en/rss/download/5 RSS feed searchs - www.search4rss.com - www.podcasts.com - http://podfinder.mevio.com Adam Curry's entertaining audio directory How to Create Your Own Podcast - A Step-by-Step Tutorial www.radio.about.com With No Technical Knowledge
This slide presentation, along with my earlier one, Podcasting 101, both as a slide presentation, and an audio file,is available at the WWW.UCHUG.ORG website. Just click the Library Links... then Meeting Presentations.
Thank you Questions?